Saturday, December 20, 2008

Poll Results: Which trail(s) do you ride on most frequently?

Alright folks, my second poll has now closed. I give a big thanks to the 12 people that took their time to submit their votes. Here are the results:

As you can clearly gather from the results, 58% of voters use the Main Yarra Trail most frequently, which is no surprise at all, considering it is a direct route until you get to Yarra Bend Park, then from there on, people tend to go their own ways to their destinations, either taking the popular Yarra Boulevard, Capital City Trail or using inner-city streets. This is followed by 33% of voters using the Koonung Creek Trail, which directly follows the Eastern Freeway. It is well known that the Koonung Creek/Main Yarra combination is popular from the Doncaster/Nunawading area to Yarra Bend Park due to the few road crossings, fairly flat terrain (the major exception is along the Eastern Freeway between Yarra Bend Park and Bulleen Road where there are a couple of short, sharp inclines, depending on your direction of travel) and direct route. Coming in third is the Dandenong Creek Trail/EastLink Trail combination (I combined both since they basically run the same route and overlap a couple of times) and any other trail in Melbourne. The EastLink Trail has proved to be a fairly decent success, with it's superior wide concrete surface, good sight lines and gradient (Mullum Mullum section excluded) and decent, but not perfect directional and warning signage. The fact that 2 footbridges are also currently being built helps things, as well as when you compare it to the sub-standard Dandenong Creek Trail it has somewhat superseeded (that is, the sections around Jells Park / Bushy Park Wetlands and around Dandenong).

The conclusion is simply that off-road paths which are fairly direct, usually running beside a creek or freeway, which run for a fair distance come out on top for popularity with riders.

A new poll will be up shortly, so please participate. It would be nice to see 13 or more people voting this time around.

Who runs this blog?

I am a male who lives and breathes all things Melbourne, with a general interest in transport. I am an ideas man who wishes to gain more public interest in transport issues which sometimes get overlooked.